The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  An Englishman living in Japan in the late 1930s noticed, ‘the Japanese have something of a genius for austerity … They can be called upon by their government to subsist for long periods on a diet so frugal that no European people would put up with it.’3 Accustomed to this austere civilian diet Japanese soldiers were prepared to accept levels of rationing which British Commonwealth, German and American soldiers would have considered unbearable. Many Japanese soldiers took pride in their ability to survive with minimal support and poured scorn on the decadent and pampered GIs. Despite having just lost the island of Biak (off the northern coast of New Guinea) to the Americans in September 1944, one anonymous Japanese diarist declared, ‘spiritually, we are the winners of this battle … Americans cannot live in a jungle subsisting on leaves and grasses; only Japanese can. The “Have” nations like America, could afford to throw away food and equipment. It is simply wasteful … Japan will surely reoccupy this island.’4

  New recruits into the Japanese army were subjected to a brutal training programme which indoctrinated them with a belief in bushido (fighting spirit), the idea that self-discipline and willpower could overcome all obstacles. Military commanders firmly believed that Japanese soldiers could be expected to continue fighting in the most impossible circumstances. This attitude was exemplified by Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi Renya, the commander in charge of the Japanese attack on India in April 1944. When the Japanese became bogged down at Imphal he stubbornly repeated the mantra, ‘drummed into [Japanese officers] from their cadet days, that because the difference between victory and defeat was razor thin, the most tenacious side would be the victor’.5 From the safe distance of Burma he instructed his troops: ‘The struggle has developed into a fight between the material strength of the enemy and our spiritual strength. Continue in the task until all your ammunition is expended. If your hands are broken fight with your feet. If your hands and feet are broken use your teeth. If there is no breath left in your body, fight with your spirit. Lack of weapons [and he might well have added lack of food] is no excuse for defeat.’6

  The fervent belief that spirit would prevail despite the overwhelmingly superior resources of their enemies was the central principle of the Japanese war effort. The ultimate expression of this belief was the use of kamikaze pilots in the last desperate months of the war when ‘human lives were substituted for material substance’.7 However, the Japanese military command was eventually to discover that there were limits to bushido. Starving Japanese troops on Guadalcanal, too weak to stand up for lack of food, were said to have brandished their bayonets at any American soldiers who approached them, demonstrating their continued fighting spirit. But when the Japanese commander Imamura Hitoshi witnessed the pitiful state of the troops on the island, he admitted that bushido was useless in the face of starvation.8 In August 1945 the Japanese government faced the decision of whether to make their civilian population, teetering on the edge of famine, suffer the same fate as their soldiers. Their dilemma was resolved by the United States dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus bringing about the Japanese surrender.

  HEALTHY EATING AS A PATRIOTIC VIRTUE

  Before the war the Japanese military were far in advance of the other combatant nations’ armed forces in terms of their attitude towards, and application of, the newly developing science of nutrition. The Meiji government, which came to power in 1868, was determined to create a strong modern Japanese army and navy modelled on those of the European powers. But in the 1870s Japanese sailors were plagued by ill health and routinely fell sick with beriberi. This was caused by an over-reliance on vitamin B-deficient polished white rice as the staple naval food. A research committee was set up to look into the matter. One of its members was Takaki Kanehiro, director of the Tokyo Naval Hospital, who had studied at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. Vitamins were not yet understood but he suggested that one ship’s company should try the experiment of living on a high-protein British naval diet of bread, ship’s biscuit, salted meat and beans. When the experimental crew arrived fit and well in Hawaii the Japanese navy decided to adopt a western diet for its sailors.9 Although the reasons for the improvement in the sailors’ health were not fully understood, this was an important development. Firstly, it predisposed military caterers to look to foreign diets as a way of reforming the eating habits of the Japanese military. Secondly, it established a strong link between physicians and the Japanese quartermaster, which was a crucial factor in facilitating the application of the discoveries of nutritional science to military rations. This placed Japanese military catering far in advance of the European and American armed services, in which this medical-catering connection was not established until the Second World War.

  Co-operation was established between army caterers and doctors in 1921 when a Military Diet Research Committee was set up to investigate the nutritional value of meat and fish. The army was beset by the problem that most of its rural recruits, drawn from a countryside in crisis and many having grown up in desperately poor farming households, were malnourished and physically weak. The committee concluded that the customary Japanese diet of rice, miso soup, a little fish, a few vegetables and pickles was not suited to the creation of robust warriors. The physical prowess of westerners had long been attributed to their meat-based diet, and it was decided to increase the amount of meat in the ration. In the 1920s Japanese soldiers were fed about 13 kilograms of beef a year. In comparison to the European annual consumption of about 50 kilograms this seems a paltry amount, but it was vastly more than the 1 kilogram a year consumed by the Japanese civilian population.10

  Under the direction of Marumoto Shozo, First Army Accountant at the Army Provisions Depot, army meals were transformed. In order to integrate meat into the soldiers’ diet Marumoto copied dishes from the inexpensive Chinese eateries and western-style restaurants which had sprung up in Japanese cities in the 1920s. Japanese servicemen were introduced to curries and stews, stir-fries, wheat noodles, pork cutlets, pan-fried chicken and breaded meats, none of which they would have encountered in their rural homes. The advantage of these western and Chinese dishes was that while they were relatively inexpensive they substantially increased the protein and fat content of army rations. Stewing, deep- and stir-frying were all novel culinary methods in 1920s Japan and a training school for army cooks was established to initiate them in the practices of foreign cookery. Mess kitchens were provided with newfangled equipment such as meat grinders and vegetable cutters. Marumoto gathered together a team of catering instructors who were sent throughout the Japanese empire re-educating army cooks. To help in this process he published a series of military cookbooks packed with information on high-calorie, low-budget meals.11

  The strategy of reforming the army diet using Chinese and western dishes was boldly innovative. Most military caterers go to great lengths to avoid serving unfamiliar foods to servicemen, who are renowned for their conservative taste buds. However, it was easier to produce meals that pleased the majority if the army cooks avoided Japanese dishes. Each region had its own distinctive cuisine and preferred a mixture of flavours, which made it extremely difficult to create even a simple miso soup which all the men liked. The taste of home-made miso varied from household to household, while different regions preferred miso with varying levels of saltiness or sweetness. An army catering reformer who conducted experiments with soldiers serving in China in 1936–37, found that while the majority liked the miso soup they were served, 22 per cent found it too sweet and 10 per cent too salty.12 The adoption of foreign dishes flattened out these taste differences and accustomed all the men to the same set of standardized tastes. This was reinforced by the use of factory-produced and thus standardized soya sauce as the predominant flavouring instead of miso.13 No matter which region the men came from, they all liked the meat-based and deep-fried dishes.14 The fact that Japanese servicemen took to these foreign dishes was, without doubt, aided by the military practice of serving white rice (mixed with barl
ey to provide vitamin B) with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Many rural recruits, used to a frugal diet based on brown rice mixed with barley or millet and eked out with radish leaves, had never eaten so well. For conscripts of the 1920s and 1930s the experience of eating plentiful and unusual food appears to have been one of the dominant memories of their time in the military.15

  In 1925 the army extended its efforts to improve Japanese health into the general population. The Army Provisions Depot set up the Provisions Friends’ Association which set about introducing the military principles of mass catering into schools, hospitals and work-place canteens. The Home Ministry provided funding for school canteens, of which there were more than 12,000 by 1940. Training academies for dieticians were founded. The army proselytized the strange arts of boiling and deep-frying and unusual ingredients such as potatoes and lard, through exhibitions and talks, radio broadcasts and cooking demonstrations.16 The aim was that every home in Japan would adopt the economical and nourishing military diet. Women’s magazines, aimed at both farming households and the urban middle classes, all included menus and recipes detailing how to prepare the high-calorie dishes that were by now standard military fare.17

  The propagation of the image of the ideal housewife feeding her family military-style meals was integral to the on-going militarization of daily life in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Propaganda emphasized that it was the responsibility of Japanese women to improve the physical strength and fighting-power of the nation. The Japanese government was far more willing to take on the responsibility for disseminating nutritional knowledge than the British government in the 1930s. However, in return, the Japanese were expected to make their best efforts to apply this information in their daily lives as part of their role as loyal subjects. This expectation was heightened by war when government propaganda ‘elevated … eating healthily at a low cost to the level of a patriotic virtue’.18

  The war with China seriously undermined these reforming efforts within both the military and the civilian population. By the late 1930s the war with China was making it increasingly difficult for the state to supply sufficient good-quality food to Japan’s urban population. A labour shortage on Japan’s farms, as a result of conscription of rural workers into the armed forces to fight in China, as well as a drop in imports from Korea and Formosa, due to a war-related increase in domestic demand and a poor harvest, resulted in a rice shortage.19 Mary Kimoto Tomita was the daughter of Japanese immigrants to America. In 1939 she arrived in Tokyo to learn something of her parents’ culture. In November she wrote to her friend Miye, ‘Japan’s general population is just beginning to feel the pinch of war. Until this summer they said that everything was the same as before the war. But now rice is scarce and the price is the highest it has been since 1918. There is a scarcity of all materials … Everything is so expensive. I wonder how the poor people live.’20 Tokyoites particularly disliked eating the long-grained gaimai, or foreign rice, which the government imported from Korea and Formosa. A rice-saving campaign tried to persuade reluctant urbanites to eat noodles and barley.21 Despite the oft-repeated claims that the patriotic Japanese were willing to make sacrifices for the ‘life-or-death struggle’ in China, Mary remarked that people actually complained heartily about the foreign rice and high prices.22 When a friend sent a parcel of American food she generously shared out the booty among her Japanese friends. ‘Food takes on so much importance in underfed Japan. Just to look around in a streetcar, one can readily see how true it is that Japan is an undernourished nation! And about half of the people have stomach trouble. Their everyday food is so frugal, so when they get a treat they soon overeat and … get indigestion.’23

  The queues in front of the rice traders’ stores lengthened each week. In April 1941, even before the Japanese government declared war on the United States, rationing had to be introduced. The different foodstuffs on the ration card were sold in a variety of retail outlets and queuing for many hours a day became a feature of Japanese life. It could sometimes take one member of a family a whole five days queuing at shop after shop to procure enough food for a week.24 John Morris, a lecturer in English at Tokyo University between 1938 and 1941, recalled that in order to avoid the queues ‘those who could afford it [made] … even more frequent use of restaurants … The number of courses remained much the same … but the quality rapidly deteriorated. Beef, which in normal times is both plentiful and excellent in Japan, practically disappeared, its place on the menu being taken more often than not by whale meat … But quite often there would be no meat of any sort available, even in the better restaurants, for days at a time.’25 As Morris rightly noted, the disappearance of meat impacted mainly upon the wealthy. Despite the nutritional campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s meat consumption had not become established among the general population. In fact, for many the whale meat which they ate during the war was their first experience of affordable meat.26

  When Morris returned to Britain in December 1941 he was struck by ‘the abundance of food. For months past I had been reading in the Japanese press about the terrible food shortage in England, so that it came as almost a shock, though an exceedingly pleasant one, to find how well we were being rationed.’27 Morris’s observation indicates just how tight Japan’s food situation was even before it entered the worldwide conflict. The diet provided by Japanese rations was austere. Each person was allowed 330 grams of rice per day, which amounted to approximately 1,160 calories.28 This was adequate as long as different cereals such as barley, sweet potatoes and pumpkins were available to supplement the rice and make filling meals. Due to the concentration of all the farmers’ energies on the cultivation of staple crops, fruit and vegetables became extremely scarce. These were the main source of essential vitamins and minerals and their disappearance opened a serious nutritional gap in the diet.29 Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor the urban population was living close to the margins of adequate nutrition.

  In order to address the problem of endless queues the government eventually placed food distribution in the hands of neighbourhood associations, which transferred the work of queuing from individual families to the head of the association. Senoh Kappa, a well-known stage-set designer, wrote a semi-fictional autobiography in which he told of his experiences as a boy, called ‘H’, during the war. His family were something of an oddity because they were Christian, and in an attempt to deflect criticism his mother took on the job of head of their neighbourhood association. ‘Even though she had expected the work to keep her very busy, Toshiko was astonished at the way it went on increasing from day to day … In the morning she would go to lectures on air raid drill, and in the afternoon she would gather the neighbours together to share with them what she’d learned; then the evenings would be occupied with the pick-up and distribution of rations.’30 She had to be very careful how she divided up the portions of dried fish and vegetables to avoid accusations of unfairness.

  In Japanese society, where membership of a ‘voluntary’ association was virtually compulsory, the neighbourhood associations were the urban equivalent of the Rural Revitalization associations in the countryside. Initially conceived as instruments of social indoctrination, during the war they became increasingly important as economic and organizational institutions. They set up air and fire defence groups, kept an eye out for thieves and illicit activities, and encouraged their members to put their money into savings.31 The workings of the associations reveal the double-sided nature of the Japanese state’s dealings with its citizens. On the one hand they provided an instrument by which the government could intrude into the private lives of ordinary people. Government nutritionists used the associations to influence eating habits, often directing which meals people should cook by tailoring the rations so that they provided the ingredients for a specific meal, the recipe for which was provided along with the food. Nutritionists taught the association heads how to cook with unfamiliar foods and gave them tips on how to save food, all of which they were expected to pass on
to the women in their associations. The associations were used to convey the government message to its citizens that it expected them to make the best of their frugal rations as part of their sacrifice for the war effort.32 By reinforcing social control and mutual surveillance, they deepened the repressive nature of Japanese society. But they also satisfied the Japanese preference for social harmony. Rather than dealing with a large, faceless, centralized institution, the ordinary civilian encountered an old-fashioned replacement for the extended family. Those urban citizens without relatives to turn to could admit their need for aid to the association. When they worked as intended, the associations provided urban inhabitants with an extended and supportive community in a time of need.33

  Rice and food shortages also impacted on military rations. In 1929 army meals provided each soldier with 4,000 calories a day.34 This was nearly double the average civilian consumption of 2,200 calories and far richer in protein and fat.35 But in 1941 the military ration was halved. At 600 grams of rice a day it was still double that received by civilians but it meant that Japanese soldiers, who in the 1930s had been fed almost as well as US servicemen, now received a ration which equated to only half the food eaten by a GI.36 The army catering service continued to demonstrate high levels of innovation and expertise in their creation of sophisticated ration packs. Indeed, American ration-pack developers considered the emergency rations of Japanese airmen particularly good, and issued instructions on how to work out what was in the packs so that US soldiers could consume any they found.37 But the sophisticated mess menus of Chinese noodles, curries and western pork cutlets were abandoned out in the field.

  Each Japanese infantryman carried his personal ration of 600 grams of rice per day in his own rucksack along with packs of miso powder or soya sauce. If he was fortunate he was also issued with some tinned or pickled vegetables, tea, salt and sugar. Rice was not an easy food to use as a field ration. It tended to spoil in the humid heat of the Pacific islands and it had to be prepared before dawn or after sunset lest the smoke from the numerous cooking fires gave away the unit’s position. Unlike canned meat it could not be eaten raw in an emergency. But the men preferred it to bread or hard biscuits.38 If supplies were maintained and the rice was mixed with barley or wheat and supplemented by other ration components, it provided an adequate, if frugal, field ration.